Why You Should Give Homeland Another Chance

One of the distinctively great things about TV is that, unlike novels or movies, it’s always a work in progress. A good show can go off the rails for a whole season—remember that awful year when Buffy went to college?—then pull itself back on track. That’s what’s happening with season four of Homeland. The show has finally dispensed with Nicholas Brody, the ginger-haired hero-terrorist-lover-martyr whose drawn-out survival not only led to twists so implausible Shonda Rhimes would chuck them on the reject pile but transformed Claire Danes’s headstrong Carrie Mathison into such a bundle of twitches and tears that Anne Hathaway’s wobble-chinned parody on SNL felt understated. Now that Brody’s dead, Carrie can get on with her life as a gonzo CIA agent—brilliant, monomaniacal, bipolar—who downs her pills with white wine.

As the new season begins, Carrie is herself a gone girl: gone back to work for the Company, gone off to Kabul and Islamabad, and gone up in the world—she’s now station chief in Kabul. This gets her involved in international stories with a lot of topical juice: air strikes on terrorists, some of which kill civilians; foreign countries’ anger at having their sovereignty violated by drones; angry mobs attacking American personnel. Along the way, Carrie needs to find the bad apple in the Islamabad station and maybe recruit a young Pakistani medical student, played by Suraj Sharma, the sweet-faced young man from Life of Pi, who couldn’t possibly have terrorist ties, could he?

Carrie is often almost shockingly unsympathetic. She fobs off her love-child with Brody to her exasperated sister (a pitch-perfect Amy Hargreaves), blackmails her way into power, and displays not the slightest remorse over the civilians she’s had killed. Of course, being Carrie, she also gets involved in some sort of warped-up amorous scenario. But this time, she’s not the love-struck one. Instead, she exploits the romantic feelings of Peter Quinn (a terrific Rupert Friend), a disillusioned, emotionally impacted CIA assassin who has become the show’s unlikely conscience. Carrie isn’t likable in any conventional sense, yet this seems perfectly reasonable in one who risks her life doing intelligence work in distant lands where a mistake gets you killed. She’s supposed to do all that—and be nice, too? From the beginning I’ve liked Carrie better as a ruthless intelligence operative than as the weeping The Spy Who Loved Him. So welcome back, Agent Mathison. You’ve been missed.